Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.

I’ve played around with a few web-based music apps, and this is by far my favorite. It’s a software version of the Tenori-On that boils the drum machine and sequencer interface down to their barest essentials. If you’ve never made electronic music before, the iNudge would be a great introduction. The software that I use for my tracks is more complex, but the core functionality is the same.

The iNudge was made by Hobnox, makers of Audiotool, a much bigger and more complex web-based music program. I find the Audiotool to be interesting and graphically attractive, but too complicated and not discoverable enough. Part of the problem is that the Audiotool emulates electronic music production hardware. That’s fine if you’re familiar with the gear it’s emulating, but it’s a mystifying bunch of knobs otherwise. Propellerheads’ Reason suffers from the same problem. It does a great job of emulating a variety of hardware devices, but as a visual metaphor for a computer program, it’s annoyingly counterfunctional. The “hardware” turns into a bunch of decorative elements that take up valuable screen real estate and attentional resources from the screen regions that actually do stuff.

The Tenori-On is a terrific visual metaphor and it translates well to the computer screen. If you’ve mastered the mouse or touchscreen, you know all you need to know. Audio software is most discoverable when it abstracts away from hardware and represents its different modules as simple boxes connected by arrows, like Max/MSP. The ideal interface for the signal chain would be a flexible network visualization tool like Omnigraffle.

Another nice feature of iNudge is the way it presents pitches to you. The adjacent rows on the grid aren’t mapped to the piano keys. They’re mapped to the D major/B minor pentatonic scale. You’re limited exclusively to that scale. You lose access to many notes, but you also can’t do anything that sounds bad. Vertically the grid limits you to straight eighth notes. As with the harmony, it restricts your choices but also prevents you from doing anything unmusical. If I were to extend the program one step more complicated, I might include a palette or pull-down menu with different rhythmic grids and scales.

Some other noteworthy music-making tools on the web:

The Daft Punk console let you remix “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.”

JS-909 is a drum machine in the browser.

Indaba is full-blown audio recording, mixing and editing in the browser with a social media component. I haven’t explored it too thoroughly yet, but I’m impressed by its ambition and scope.

Another in-browser audio recorder and editor I haven’t tried yet is Myna.

Ways to embed mp3s and playlists in the browser:

Facebook – when you post the URL of an mp3 file, FB automatically posts it in a neat little player.

Tumblr – same as Facebook.

Soundcloud – The best band-centric mp3 hosting and sharing service I’ve come across. Nice interface, including the option to comment on specific regions of songs.

The groovy WordPress mp3 plugin that I use throughout this blog.

Twitter with its associated third-party music add-ons like Blip.fm.

I think the merging of music-making and social media is an exciting development. Anything to bring more audience participation to the game is a good idea. If you guys can point me at some more fun tools and toys, hit the comments.

Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good case.

It wasn’t even Lil Wayne’s rhymes that caught my ear in the first place, it was his tracks. His music sounds fine on regular headphones or speakers, but it reveals its true power in the club or in a car with a good system. The tempos are slow, the beats are minimalist, and there’s plenty of space around every sonic event. On the big hits, like “A Milli” and “Lollipop”, an 8o8 kick drum is the only sound in the low register. There’s usually no bass guitar or even bass synth – the tuned 808 kick carries the bassline. The vocals, snares, hi-hats and synths are all up in the high frequencies. The midrange is totally empty.

Emptying the midrange adapts Wayne’s music perfectly to its natural habitat: cars, parties, clubs, subway trains and other noisy, less-than-ideal listening environments. In a club or a party, the midrange is full of people talking. In a car or train, the midrange is full of engine and wind noise. Keeping the music’s midrange empty means that it doesn’t have to compete with the ambient sound. The songs can sound huge and full and totally present without blowing your eardrums or your speakers out. Another benefit of the empty midrange is that it leaves room for you to enjoy the upper overtones of the kickdrum. Even severely compressed and played through computer speakers, Lil Wayne’s music sounds pretty damn hot:

The weird vocal sample the song is named for comes from “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix),” a remix of the Tribe Called Quest song by Fatboy Slim. The original Tribe song has a sample in it of “Funky” by The Chambers Brothers. That makes “A Milli” a remix of a remix of a remix. Recursive!

I’ve been drawn to the musicality of hip-hop since I was a kid, but at times I’ve been scared off by all the angry and confrontational language. As a kid, I could mostly enjoy with Run-DMC. Sometimes I found them a little bit scary, but mostly they made sense to me. My friend Elbert played me some Public Enemy in ninth grade, and I felt like it wasn’t meant for me, but I liked it. When we got into the nineties, that’s when I lost touch with hip-hop. I wanted to like the Wu-Tang Clan and the west coast gangsta rappers, but I got scared away.

It took me several more years to realize that I wasn’t supposed to be taking all the imagery literally. I didn’t understand that rappers, like rock singers, are often playing characters or doing standup comedy. It makes sense that Ice Cube has made such a smooth transition from gangsta rap to family comedies. Hip-hop has a lot of theatricality and irony to it, and even a liberal, open-minded white guy like me can lose sight of that. I fell into the bad habit of underestimating the intelligence of hip-hop artists and didn’t allow for the possibility of multiple or opposite meanings to what I was hearing. Imagine if you were plunked down in America without any cultural context and someone showed you an episode of South Park or Family Guy. If you didn’t realize they were kidding, you’d probably be horrified. That’s pretty much what my first reaction was to the dirtier hip-hop styles.

I’m glad I let go of my moral objections to Lil Wayne. He’s crude a lot of the time, but he’s never dumb, and he’s capable of dazzling verbal virtuosity. There’s the famous line in “Lollipop” that everybody quotes, it’s like what Cole Porter would be writing if he were a young guy right now:

Safe sex is great sex. Better use a latex,
’cause you don’t want that late text, that “I think I’m late” text.

Lil Wayne’s high opinion of himself extends to his choice of samples. He samples several of his own tracks for his song “I’m Me.” Again: recursive.

Like his frequent collaborators T-Pain and Kanye West, Lil Wayne likes singing with Auto-tune.

If you haven’t been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, “Lollipop” represents the state of the art well. The synths are gridded out exactly in a sequencer so as to sound totally posthuman. Wayne plays a little electric guitar with a sloppiness that balances the synths’ unearthly perfection. There are big yawning digital silences in the rhythm that are as powerful as the beats themselves.

The Auto-tuned robo-vocal style inspired me to sing more on my own tracks, which is a minor miracle, because I am not a singer. The sign of a real master musician is when they fill me with an intense, competitive desire to go apply their tricks to some new music of my own.

I think Lil Wayne’s music is healthy for nerdy white people like me. Having a sense of humor about the human body and its functions is the right attitude. Natalie Portman kind of says it best, when she’s asked what song reflects her current state by Interview Magazine:

PORTMAN: Really, really obscene hip-hop. I love it so much. It makes me laugh and then it makes me want to dance. Those are like my two favorite things, so combined . . . I’ve been listening a lot lately to “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins, where the lyrics are like, “Wait ’til you see my dick” – which is just amazing because it’s whispered. [whispers] “Wait ’til you see my dick . . . ” [laughs] Crazy. So I just listen to it like I’m a five-year-old, like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe he just said that!”

When she rapped on Saturday Night Live, she was kind of kidding, kind of not.

In some ways this could be a Jewish thing. Like Natalie, my mom and the majority of my relatives are in the tribe. I went to a mostly Jewish elementary and high school. My Jewish side finds America’s puritanism weird and lame. I also have a midwestern protestant side I inherited from my dad. This side of me thinks prudishness is lame, but also Not Optional. So there’s some internal conflict. It can be like Jon Stewart vs Hank Hill in my head. Lil Wayne is a good ally in my struggle to keep Hank under control.

But then, Lil Wayne may have more in common with Hank Hill than we realize. He carefully cultivates the image of a stoned slacker, but that performance masks an intense work ethic. It’s significant that the “A Milli” video shows Lil Wayne doing his job. He records new material almost every night. I can’t think of any recording artist who’s been more prolific than he has. Almost everything he records, he makes public. Some of it gets sold commercially, the rest he gives away on mixtapes and the web. He puts out so many tracks that Vibe could write an article called “The 77 best Lil Wayne songs of 2007.” He talks about his process a little in Rolling Stone:

You never write down your rhymes. Do you ever forget good stuff?

I do that a lot and it sucks. That’s why I keep the studio with me everywhere I go. I can just hook up the studio straight to my laptop and start recording. I don’t memorize lyrics like a speech. I just go to the studio and think of it right there. I just let the beat play a trillion times and I go in there and record four bars or whatever I thought of so I can get it off my mind and start thinking about something else. That’s why I do my songs so quick.

I think any creative person could learn a lot from the Lil Wayne strategy. Computer recording encourages improvisation. Improvising is a bottomless source of new ideas. Creativity is evolutionary, you need to have a lot of failures to naturally select out the hits. The wider the diversity of your failures, the more hits you’ll produce. That’s why Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones recorded hundreds of demos so they could narrow them down into the songs on Thriller. Lil Wayne takes the idea up a notch by releasing everything for public consumption and letting the fans decide what works and what doesn’t. I’d guess this demanding routine keeps him from ever getting hung up, from getting too precious. He probably gets things right in a very few tries. Keeping your ideas under so much evolutionary pressure makes them definite. As Lil Wayne says in “Shoot Me Down”:

My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of definition.

He’s definite enough to have sampled the Beatles and gotten the copyright smackdown for it. (Thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones for pointing me to this.)

The comments on this video are hostile. I can understand not liking the music, but the anger is way more intense than that. I can’t imagine having so many people that angry at me. If Lil Wayne can keep his confidence up in the face of so much scrutiny and resistance, I don’t see how any creative person has any excuse not to step up their game.

Here’s my mashup of Lil Wayne and Björk.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

To download, right-click or option-click the link and save the file to your desktop.

Word started off pretty useful, but each successive version was a bigger and bigger drag. There were more toolbars and menus and animated characters giving unwanted advice. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I followed the geek example and switched over to plain text editors and HTML.

But this year I wrote a book proposal and some other long-form, complicated stuff. It got to be difficult keeping track of which thoughts were in which text file. Then I read a blog post by Steven Poole called “Goodbye, Cruel Word” that hipped me to Scrivener, and I’ve never looked back.

Scrivener costs $39.95 to Word’s $229.00. Instead of Word’s awkward metaphor of sheets of paper in a typewriter, Scrivener is based around the idea of index cards on a corkboard. Here’s part of my book proposal’s sample chapter.

You can reorder the cards by dragging and dropping. Cards can contain groups of other cards, or even folders of folders of folders of other cards. You can also drag and drop in and out of the outline on the left. You can drag and drop stuff from the Finder too.

Having to come up with little titles for your index cards forces me to think on the meta-level. This has been valuable, because I need all the help I can get to come up with a point and stick to it. You can write your own summaries on your index cards, or you can have the computer generate them automatically from the cards’ content.

In its basic word-processing capacities, Scrivener is really just a dashboard for TextEdit. This is a good thing. Scrivener has its own particular file format, but it conveniently exports to Rich Text, Word documents, HTML and myriad other formats.

The only way for me to have fully-formed thoughts is to write them out of order in nonlinear chunks that I rearrange later. I don’t have the attention span to write from top to bottom. I admire people who do. One of my literary heros is Philip Pullman, the author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Pullman says on his web site that he writes for three hours a day longhand on a legal pad in his tool shed. I don’t even approach having that kind of discipline. I’m a child of TV and the internet. I grew up in a fragmented family in a fragmented city in a fragmented country. If I can’t even think in linear streams, it’s not realistic to expect myself to write that way.

The index card format also helps with anxiety and writer’s block. There’s nothing worse than a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of a blank screen. I prefer to copy and paste in some text from wikipedia or my Delicious bookmarks and then start organizing it into index cards.

I appear to have two writing behaviors. There’s the efflorescence stage, where I start with my notes and source text and let things flow outwards from there, doing my best to not judge or criticize, just banging stuff out. Then comes the pruning stage, cutting the unwanted branches off, letting the inner critic do its job. Pruning mode is also where I have to come up with all the metadata. If I can’t find a home for something, it can always go to the blog or the odds and ends folder.

Scrivener is a good outliner, but my Mac came free with an even better one called OmniOutliner. It’s all too rare for the name of a program to explain what it does, but OmniOutliner describes itself well. It makes outlines, in an omnipotent and omniscient way. In fact, that’s all it does, which is a refreshing change of pace when you’re used to Microsoft bloatware. Scrivener has a lot of OmniOutliner’s core functionality, like drag and drop ordering and metadata and expanding/collapsing sections. But OmniOutliner does automatic section numbering, which Scrivener doesn’t. More importantly, OmniOutliner renumbers your sections and subsections as you move stuff around. Once you’re done you can just export your neatly numbered outline as Rich Text and drop it into Scrivener. Bring on the writing jobs!